Pages

Friday, July 1, 2011

1920s Unemployment, Old Wallpaper, Breakfast Robes

I'd expected some sort of spread on Independence Day, but not much of anything in the New York Tribune!

Unemployment Benefits, 1920s style:

Girls Asking Funds for Jobless Jailed; Judge is Indignant
---
Sweetser Calls Arrest of Trio in Ferry Crowds Outrage; Two Locked Up for Night on Obscure Complaint
---
Three young girls were arrested by the police while they were soliciting funds in the ferry crowds on Saturday for an institution that is aiding the unemployed. One of the girls was able to procure bail, but the other two, failing to get a hearing at the Women's Night Court, were locked up in a station house all night. Yesterday, in the Tombs court, Magistrate Sweetser characterized the arrests as outrageous.

The girls are Daisy Russell, eighteen years old; Marcia Phillips, twenty, and Winifred Millard, twenty-one, and they were arrested, respectively, at the Christopher Street, Chambers Street and Desbrosses Street ferries. They had tin boxes for collecting coins from the crowds. Patrolman Albert Dittmar made the arrests.

At the Charles Street station a friend of Miss Millard's put up bail. Miss Russell and Miss Phillips were taken to the Women's Night Court, where their lawyer was unable to get a hearing, and were then sent back tot he Charles Street station and locked up for the night.

Yesterday Magistrate Sweetser, to whose court the girls were taken, paroled them for a hearing on Wednesday, saying that the cause of the arrests seemed obscure.

Harry C. Messervy, of the Timely Service Society, 13 West Forty-sixth Street, for which the girls were collecting, said yesterday that the society had a farm at Blackwell's Mills, N. J., where unemployed men could stay until work was found for them. Farmers came there from all directions, he said, to engage farm help.

So men without jobs had to leave their families, it appears, but then found farm jobs of the variety that migrants often do today. Interesting...

Too cute to pass up.

Wallpaper on 100 Years
---
Collector Seeks Hand-Painted Decoration in Old Home
---Special Dispatch to The Tribune
LEE, Mass., July 3.--A collector of curiosities has offered Mrs. George Beach, of this village, $200 if she will let him take the wallpaper off of the walls in her parlor. The room was papered more than one hundred years ago.

The paper was painted by hand in France. It is in a series of panels, depicting the adventures of a knight in armor.